The title of the Nova/National Geographic television special was intriguing, and a bit misleading: “Quest for Solomon’s Mines. Archeologists seek the truth about the Bible’s most famous king and his legendary riches.”

Tom Levy, an anthropological archeologist at UC San Diego and a key figure in the 2010 PBS documentary, is just back to the La Jolla campus for the winter quarter after spending the fall leading his newest dig in southern Jordan.

“The raison d’être of my career is not finding King Solomon’s mines,” said Levy, who has launched a new “cyber-archaeology” project funded by the National Geographic Society and the National Science Foundation. “I’m interested in the rise of state-level societies in the ancient Near East. In that part of the world, that coincides with a number of ancient kingdoms we know about from the Old Testament.”

Levy has been digging in the Faynan area of Jordan since 1997. Known as Punon in the book of Exodus, it is in the Dead Sea Rift Valley which separated ancient Israel from the kingdom of Edom. Before going to southern Jordan, Levy worked in the Negev Desert in Israel, where he found copper that could be traced through lead isotope analysis to his current area of interest.

“I was drawn to Faynan specifically because of the copper and its central role in providing this material for the development of the whole southeast Mediterranean,” Levy said.

While the Bible refers to the great wealth of King Solomon, the son of David, there is no mention of his mines. “King Solomon’s Mines” is the title of an 1885 British adventure novel and subsequent movies.

“We can’t say we found King Solomon’s mines,” Levy said. “But, before our work, the scholarly consensus was that in the 10th century B.C., the time of David and Solomon, there no complex societies. It was though that a united monarchy in ancient Israel was complete fiction.”

The consensus, Levy said, was that the kind of industrial scale metal production he and his researchers have documented in Faynan could not have begun until about 700 B.C.

But high-precision radiocarbon dating of material from the dig done at Oxford University changed the timeline.

“It supported the view that there was a society in the 10th century B.C. capable of building monumental structures in Jerusalem and elsewhere.”

With the popular notoriety generated by the television show fading, Levy continues to work in the area.

He has moved on from the mining and ore processing complex he and his colleagues and students excavated from 2002 to 2009.

Now he and his colleague of 15 years, Mohammad Najjar, a retired official of Jordan’s Department of Antiquities, have launched a five-year project to excavate a major settlement site about seven kilometers from the mining and smelting operation.

“Now we’re going to shed light on the political and economic center of what I believe is the earliest capitol of Biblical Edom and its control of copper production,” Levy said.